To applause from the crowd, he called Merkel a “chancellor-dictator” and said Germany’s mainstream parties were pursuing a policy of “human flooding,” an “attempt to gradually replace the German people with a population coming from all parts of the earth.”

The remarks could later be seen in a video posted on YouTube from the rally in the town of Elsterwerda Thursday.

Policemen stand near the venue of a party congress of the German right-wing party AfD (Alternative fuer Deutschland) at the Stuttgart Congress Centre ICS on April 30, 2016 in Stuttgart, southern Germany. (AFP/Philipp Guelland)

Gauland, 75, is seen twice reading from a sign held by a member of the crowd: “Today we are tolerant and tomorrow foreign in our own country,” a far-right slogan used by the neo-Nazi NPD party.

The hardline deputy AfD leader drew widespread condemnation late last month by saying most Germans would not want footballer Jerome Boateng, whose father is Ghanaian, as a neighbor — a comment Merkel’s spokesman slammed as “vile and sad.”

Gauland followed up Friday by saying the national team is “no longer… German in the classical sense.”

The three-year-old AfD has assumed an increasingly anti-immigrant and Islamophobic stance as Europe’s biggest economy let in nearly 1.1 million asylum seekers last year.

It is currently polling at about 15 percent nationwide after capturing seats in three state elections in March.

Analysts say it has tapped into angst over the migrant influx, which has slowed significantly in recent months, and bitter infighting in Merkel’s ruling conservative bloc.

Addressing the open dispute over asylum policy, Horst Seehofer, the head of the Christian Social Union, the Bavarian sister party to Merkel’s Christian Democrats, pledged Sunday to try to bury the hatchet.

“The chancellor and I have again created a basis of trust that we can build on,” he told the Bild am Sonntag newspaper.

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